Exploring the Itch.io Collection #4

I’m in-between big articles, so I figured I’d do one more of these in the meantime.

However, I must bring up something important first, while I’m at it. Earlier this year, online gaming platforms such as Steam and, yes, itch.io, faced a major problem. An organization known as Collective Shout wrote an open letter to all payment processors, lobbying them to act against online gaming platforms that housed video games containing heavy topics such as incest, rape or child abuse. Payment processors (PayPal, credit card companies, and so on) acted with a swiftness, threatening to pull their services from Steam and itch.io unless adult-only games with those themes were pulled or impossible to purchase from now on. A request that Steam and itch.io agreed to follow!

Okay, so let me start by saying that these topics are horrible things in the real world. Do I really need to state such an obvious? However, video games are a medium for fiction, and as such they, too, should be allowed to cover these topics, in the same way that movies, TV shows, music and novels have for decades. Imagine if, at the height of the popularirty of Game of Thrones, VISA or MasterCard decided, "Nope, some people don't like the stuff in there, therefore we won't let you buy that Blu-Ray set or subscribe to HBO!"

By the same metric, we can assume that people who purchase and play those games consent to experiencing these themes (bonus points if the game does come with a trigger warning just in case), and have enough of a head on their shoulders to understand that what’s going on in the game is NOT glorification of those themes. (If a video game seriously advocated for rape, incest, child abuse, whatever, you’d be able to tell, and such a game would be rightly called out for it.)

Tons of games were stricken down that had nothing pornographic about them, and were either portrayals of LGBTQ+ experiences and/or were autobiographical in content. Experiencing something difficult safely through the medium of fiction can mentally help those who have lived through similar things in the real world, with the barrier of fiction giving some distance. Use of these themes in fiction can also help others recognize when such situations are, in fact, happening in real life.

That payment processors suddenly get to decide what the average person can and can’t do with their own money is outrageous, ‘cause last I checked it wasn’t illegal to buy fiction. The response from the Internet has been to organize campaigns and mass-call the credit card companies and PayPal’s phone lines to tell them to reverse the decision. As far as I can tell, a first step was made by the platforms enacting their own rules to circumvent some of the payment processors’ new requests, and even today I don't think all the games are back for sale. Despite the Internet rersponse, don’t be fooled; if Collective Shout's ploy has worked once, even temporarily, it will be attempted again.

Call it what it is: It’s censorship. It may benefit a small group in the short term, but it will penalize everyone in the long term, and we can NOT let this slide. We must never forget that this happened. We must not let up in calling the payment processors who took part in this, and admonishing them for it. They do not have a right to block legal purchases, based solely on their content. Nor can we forget the gaming platforms that bowed. Slippery slope is a sophism, fair; but we must be prepared for the possibility that another group tries to make this happen once more. I did not address it until now because I just didn’t have the time to write about it at the height of the issue in July; I figured I’d use this article to talk about it in the intro, since the itch.io platform was affected in a significant manner due to its creative community being struck hard by that controversy. Anyway, in short: Prepare yourself, just in case this happens again, because it could.

Sorry about the downer starter. Anyway, here’s a bunch of games under 13 minutes long.

Experiences

Yeah, that thing ain't right.

ring ring: A mysterious phone found on the beach, which functions without electricity or a phone line. Calling any 4-digit number leads to odd discussions, but something’s off. Someone contacted, named George, tells you that everyone you’ve spoken to is trapped in the phone, and so your goal is to avoid getting taken as well (which is a Game Over) while looking for a way to defeat the evil spirit it contains within that's causing all this. This one’s simple, you use the rotary dial to make random calls, occasionally get proper phone numbers to call and further the plot. The only thing on the screen is that clay sculpture phone, so it’s minimalist yet does things very well. Be aware, there may be jump scares!

Oh, that's almost majestic.

Throw Cubes into Brick Towers to Collapse Them: A physics sandbox, as described by the game page. You can create any kind of tower of bricks (or cubes) you can design, then throw one cube into them and see how they fall apart from being disturbed. You can zoom in or out to see how the tower falls apart, or you can make it so tall that it will fall on its own given enough time. More of a physics tester than a game, but it is fun to watch. It’s almost contemplative.

Never super great to steer a boat in a storm... also, I
highly doubt I'll find something, anything, around here.

Trawl: In your fishing boat, explore the sea and look for secrets to fish out of the water. You can direct your boat and the speed at which you’re going, then you can go at the back of the boat to plunge the net and then find treasures. At least, in theory. You can then go downstairs and write a message on your own typewriter (a copy of your message will be saved in your files), shove it in a bottle, and throw the bottle in the water afterwards. Meh – the boat is nice, and some folks say they did find stuff in the water, but I never found anything.

Un pas fragile: Closer to a short film than a proper game, this one shows multiple miniature scenes in which a young frog girl is following ballet classes as her school and home life goes on. We follow her from being mocked by classmates to making friends out of them, all the way to the recital. This one’s adorable! No wonder it won awards!

The whole thing's adorable. Worth the eight or so
minutes it'll take of your time.

Can Androids Pray: Red: A narrative choice-driven game. Two mechs piloted by female-presenting androids have crashed on the desolate Earth and are awaiting their “death”, so to speak, so all that remains is to reminisce on their situation. A theological discussion on God ensues. It’s a deep and intriguing way to present the subject, and though I think dialogue choices lead to different text, I doubt it really makes a difference at the end.

Social reach

Counting down the years till 1977...

1977: Radio Aut: A story told through text, images and choices to take from time to time, about a boy born in a mafia family in Sicily who grows to resent the mafia and decides to fight against it. However, the town is practically controlled by it at all levels, so it’s all but bound to fail. This is the true story of Giuseppe “Peppito” Impastato, and how it inspired generations in Italy to fight against organized crime. A great aspect of this one is how some choices throw a wrench, like being forced to choose a specific option, or having options shuffle with no way to control what you land on because Giuseppe is panicking. Important stuff.

Plain games

You don't have to have tons of pixels to make something
look friggin' amazing.

ZAK: A simple but solid platformer in which the eponymous protagonist starts out in a very prison-like city, escapes, and must find out what made the world so terrible. Hint: It’s aliens. Good thing we pick up that pipe on the way to knock out the enemies and the purple boss monster’s giant eyes! Classic jump and attack gameplay, time your moves right to avoid getting touched since your character has only one hit point (but infinite lives, and the checkpoints are frequent and merciful). Only issue may be the unforgiving hitbox, but that’s overall minor.

Only 15 minutes? Worth it. Displays gun
Disclaimer: Do not, do NOT do that in real life.

An Airport Game: Your character must make it to their flight, but they only have one hour to make their way through the airport. Baggage check-in, going through customs, security line, and so on – but sometimes, you’ll have to make a decision, and each option will cost minutes of your time! Will you speed through, all the way to the plane? Will you take your time to listen to everyone’s issues at the risk of being late? Or will you try stuff to miss your flight on purpose, as an example by getting arrested? The base game is simple enough, but there’s such great humor to it that it will make you want to play through it multiple times and even aim for the golden ending if possible.

THOSE GODDAMN CATS!

// Down To Earth //: Created for a game jam. In this one you play as a witch that lost her way and landed elsewhere in space and must find portals to find her way back to Earth. Your magic wand can shoot beams that hurt enemies. Magic Missile! You can eat donuts to replenish health; you’ll need them, because the levels are crawling with 2D cat heads that come at you like hordes of zombies and deal damage just by touching you. The damn things can even gang up on the player, so I eventually understood to leave no path unseen and kill everything before moving forward. The color palette was a pain to the eyes, the music got grating fast, and collision detection wasn’t great. But hey, for a game made in seven days for a jam, some of these are excusable.

"Anti-Scratch", "Academic", "Mounted". Office supplies,
right? Nah, let's try... the pet store.

Insufficient Adjectives: A great idea in theory. Delivery trucks leave your main office at the center of the screen; each truck is accompanied by three adjectives. Your task is to set road tiles on the field so that each truck delivers to the correct store, elsewhere on the screen. Anything “delicious” goes to the grocery store, while “comfortable” is the furniture store. As you progress, the slow trucks are sent at a quicker rate, forcing you to plan. The issue? You only have access to five tiles at a time, which cycle through their selection. You’ll waste time getting rid of tiles until you get the one you need! And, again, you have mutiple trucks' paths to monitor at once! I wanted to like this one; awesome concept, but the system is too frustrating. At some point, it would be tough even if you always had access to all the tile types.

I wish it was actually as fun as it looks.

Unfair Jousting Fair: The weird fair you could have never imagined! You can play against a friend or solo through the Arcade mode. Your character, no matter which it is (they all play the same), is jousting while riding a unicycle, with all the balance issues this implies. Your task is to knock the opponent off their unicycle, before they knock you off yours – or before you knock yourself off it, which is more likely to happen due to the utterly crappy controls. Left and Right are both for controlling your balance and moving forwards and backwards, which means you can’t tell which one your character is gonna do. You can aim your weapon with Up and Down, and some weapons and items can be unlocked as you play. I hated the controls, I lost interest fast. Hard pass.

10 Flights of Ballooning: An experiment all about recreating the Balloon Trip mode of the NES game Ballon Fight, first by mimicking the classic, then by throwing in surprises and twists on gameplay. The idea was born from reading a book on game philosophy about remaking a game multiple times. Everything between “Your character farts deadly stars” to “Balloons cause acid trips”, and even an “open world” of sorts in there. Not everything works great, but a few of these are enjoyable.

Ah yes, the sun wants your character dead. Classic retro.

What do you mean, that didn't work?? I need a better
summer job.

Clean ATTACK!: In this game jam entry, you play as a window cleaner holding on for dear life while rubbing away stains on the side of a building. You move up and down with W and S, and can swing left and right with A and D. You can slow down time by holding down Space (if a stain is too far off left or right), but it costs water, and you don’t have much of it to start with. The main gameplay mechanic, however, is to “draw” on the surfaces to score points – either clean line shapes, or circles. Which would be simpler if our character didn’t have the worst arm in the goddamn world. Okay, this isn’t meant to be a long, deep game, it’s a jam entry – but damn, that mechanic was so infuriating that it instantly turned me off.

Guess that’s it for today. Maybe I can squeeze a fifth article about this before the year ends, who knows.